Transform Your iPod touch Into A Makeshift Kindle

WriteRoomAhh, landscape-formatted text editing, how we missed thee.On the Mac desktop, WriteRoom is well known for the utility of its full-screen, distraction-free writing environment. On the iPhone, the app’s focus remains on writing rather than reading, but its ability to allow documents to be added and edited from your desktop machine makes it much better than the default Notes app for storing and reading short text files— especially those you might want to edit on the go.

To turn on desktop document editing, connect your iPhone and your computer to the same wireless network, and click the tree icon within the iPhone app. As of this writing, the shared connection isn’t password protected, and you’ll see a warning to this effect. Next, launch Safari on your desktop machine, click bookmarks, and select the Bonjour collection. Inside, you’ll find WriteRoom listed. Double-click its entry. The next page will allow you to add and edit WriteRoom’s file collection on the iPhone.

Within the phone app, adjustable font sizes and background colors make reading and writing more comfortable. In the end, though, the app’s most refreshing feature is its most basic: Landscape orientation is supported for both reading and editing files—a feature surprisingly absent from Apple’s built-in Notes application.

Flashlight It never hurts to have a light handy, whether you’re finishing a paperback or finding your way through the living room after sneaking in late.

For touch or iPhone owners who don’t like reading long-form text on screens of any kind, we recommend Flashlight. The application white washes your screen to reveal its full brilliance, transforming the world’s most sophisticated mobile communications device into the world’s most expensive booklight.

Despite our focus on the iPhone and iPod touch, traditional scrollwheel iPods can take advantage of e-books too—although in a more limited fashion—thanks to the Notes feature. To enable Notes on your iPod, select its entry in iTunes, and check the box next to “Enable disk use.” Click Sync, and your iPod will appear as a disk on your desktop. Files copied to the Notes folder within that disk will appear on your iPod under Extras > Notes.

Before you start copying text files, bear in mind that iPod Notes carry two important restrictions. First, the files must be in plain text format (also called ASCII text). Second, the files must be no larger than 4KB. Book-length files can easily break several hundred KB, so reading larger works will require dividing the original file into many smaller files.

Sites such as manybooks.net offer downloads preformatted as iPod Notes. Alternatively, you can convert existing plain text or rich text files at eBookhound (ebookhound.com). Upload the file you’d like to convert to Notes format, and eBookhound will break it into 4KB segments, preserving the paragraphs and other formatting as much as possible. The finished product is a ZIP file you can download to your desktop. To enjoy the converted file on your iPod, extract and copy the enclosed folder to your iPod’s Notes folder, and read the numbered files in sequential order.

Illuminating DownloadsGet your read on with these free e-book repositories and lit sources.

Project Gutenberggutenberg.orgMore than 25,000 copyright-free books, including everything they made you read in high school and college. Touch-friendly formats include plain text and html.

Feedbooksfeedbooks.comFeedbooks doesn’t offer as many titles as Project Gutenberg, but it does offer better organization, a greater selection of contemporary titles, and a wider range of format choices. The entire catalog is built into Stanza.

Manybooks.netmanybooks.netThe site features most of Project Gutenberg’s content but offers it in a much wider variety of file formats, including PDFs formatted specifically for the touch screen and traditional iPod Notes.

Cory Doctorow’s Craphoundcraphound.comCopyright-reform activist and writer Cory Doctorow has been putting all of his books online in a variety of DRM-free formats for years, and his website offers them all. Those curious about the practice would do well to download his latest book, Content, a collection of essays about copyright and the Web.

Tor.comtor.comScience fiction and fantasy readers will appreciate the free short stories found here and the touch-friendly Web design.

Give Me Something to Readgivemesomethingtoread.comInstapaper developer Marco Arment stocks this site with some of the more popular articles saved by Instapaper’s users. Subject matter varies, but the reliable selection of timely long-form writing does not.

Comments

How can you bemoan the fact that "most commercial e-book stores are useless to the iPhone, including Amazon’s Kindle Store"? What planet do you live on? The Kindle store is not the be-all and end-all of e-books, you know.

Are you not aware of Fictionwise's eReader application? You know, Fictionwise, pretty much the biggest name in e-book sales who isn't Amazon? The people who've been in business for about ten years, and bought their only major competitor, eReader (nee Palm Digital Media, nee Peanut Press)? (Also, Stanza just added support for eReader files to its own client, but that happened today, well after this article was written, so we can leave that aside.)

And how can you leave out the other e-book applications, such as Bookshelf? Granted, Bookshelf costs $10, but it's a lot better reader for the (unencrypted) Mobipocket format than Stanza, which strips out all formatting including italics and boldface from converted Mobi or HTML files.

Come on, guys, do a little research, huh? Here would be a good place to start.

When someone types the AirSharing url http://iphone...etc.local:8080/ in any browser (be it desktop or another iPhone), they get a really cool browsing experience! They can browse files, read and/or download them right from your phone.